


Lavender & Iron

by hops



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: F/M, Firsts, Spoilers for finale, a bunch of little anecdotes about their lives, uhh idk what these are called? snippets?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-23
Updated: 2017-08-23
Packaged: 2018-12-18 23:05:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11884740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hops/pseuds/hops
Summary: The first time he sees her, she’s outside the Hammer and Tongs, carrying boxes that look too heavy for a young woman her age, but she’s lifting them with ease. As she turns to thank the merchant, a breeze flows through her hair. A red bandana keeps it neatly out of her face. The world moves in slow motion for a moment. She laughs.Fifteen remarkable moments in the lives of Julia and Magnus Burnsides.





	Lavender & Iron

**Author's Note:**

> (This started as a 'Ten Firsts' thing and wound up as this monster.)  
> (Special thanks to @anonymousalchemist and her super rad fic Up The Revolution for giving me that good Burnsides mood and deffo shaped how I imagine Julia) ((How do you link to things on here I forget))

 

**i.**

The first time he sees her, she’s outside the Hammer and Tongs, carrying boxes that look too heavy for a young woman her age, but she’s lifting them with ease. As she turns to thank the merchant, a breeze flows through her hair. A red bandana keeps it neatly out of her face. The world moves in slow motion for a moment. She laughs.

The sound of feet and hooves and wheels on the cobblestone fade away. Her smile makes his heart twist in anticipation of something… familiar. It pulls him forward, but he can’t move.

It’s then that he realizes he’s stopped in the middle of the road, and people are walking around and in front of him and blocking his line of sight. She retreats back into the storefront and out of view.

That night, he stares at the ceiling and wonders what her name is.

 

**ii.**

“Hey, new kid.”

The first time she speaks to him, he’s alone at the bar, midday on a Wednesday. Not a great first impression. The sight of her nearly knocks him off his feet. _Julia,_ he’d heard from the others on the Corridor. The carpenter’s daughter, the next Waxman set to inherit the workshop and forge. She sets down a chair (which matches all the others in the room) that she had strapped to her back and covered in a canvas.

She smirks. “Cat got your tongue? Or is it the cider?”

“I--” He can’t speak. “Hi. I’m not-- this is just--”

“Oh, I’m not above day drinking,” she laughs and takes a seat next to him, nodding to the bartender for her usual. Magnus raises a brow despite the maelstrom of nervousness within him.

She sits for a while, and for the first time since arriving in Raven’s Roost, he’s not alone.

 

**iii.**

Steven takes him on as an apprentice. His first day is hard, but Steven calls him a natural. When he takes a break for a glass of water, he watches Julia through the doorway to the forge, admiring the pressed line of her lips in concentration and the ripple of muscle beneath the sleeves of her rolled up shirt.

When she pulls the metal from the coals, he watches as she dips her still-glowing creation, a sword, into cool water. As the steam rises, she glances over her shoulder.

“Cool sword,” he says. She laughs. He kicks himself about it for days.

  
**iv.**

She asks him first, to go on a date with her. It shocks him. He’s never met a woman so headstrong. So heartstrong. So _strong_ in general. She nearly knocks him off his feet with the question.

“Of course I will, Jules,” he says, reeling.

She hugs him tight, then dashes out the door, calling, “see you tonight!” The smell of lavender and iron linger behind her.

  
**v.**

It’s clumsy, the first time he kisses her. They’re in the kitchen, alone, making dinner while her father is making one final (and late) delivery. She’s stirring a pot of pasta while he chops vegetables. He makes a joke and she laughs, and _gods,_ that sound, like the perfect ringing of a silver bell. (And sometimes, punctuated with a snort.)

It’s too early, he knows. It’s too early to say it, but he loves her.

He turns and says, “Jules?” but it sounds as if the air’s been knocked from his lungs.

She turns and in one motion he bumps into her while reaching for her cheek, and presses his lips to the corner of her mouth. Her grin against his lips, in that moment, cements in his mind forever.

She makes sure to kiss him properly. The pasta boils over, and as they both bend down to mop up the water, they knock heads, then kiss again, just because they can.

  
**vi.**

The first time he says it, it pours from him. Less like a glass and more like a waterfall.

They’re walking home, lit only by the light of two moons. The squeeze of her hand in his punctuates her excitement.

“I love you,” he blurts out. The shock of something completely expected and welcome touches her face. When she can’t get a word out, she grabs him by the face and kisses him. It’s desperate, hungry, tender, sweet.

“I love you,” he rejoices with a sigh onto her parted lips. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

 

**vii.**

He’s kissing down her chest. Stomach. Thighs.

His hands roam over her, so brand new. She frames his face with her hands as he kisses a hipbone.

“Can I?” he whispers for the first time. She nods.

 

**viii.**

The revolution is months of planning for a few dangerous, whirlwind days. Close calls punctuate the days before they drive Kalen out of the city and away from the pillars of Raven’s Roost. When they’re finally alone at home, they peel off their bloodied clothes and take a moment to look at each other, still miraculously _there_ and breathing. Their eyes meet, then part again in silence, assessing new wounds that will heal as raised white scars. There’s a line through his eyebrow where a broken bottle had just licked him.

He’s on one knee, untying a boot, when he starts to cry. She turns with her hand over her heart, like she can feel the weight inside him pressing down on herself.

“I don’t have a ring yet,” he says through tears. “But I need to spend the rest of my life with you.”

“Yes,” she says. It’s all she has to say.

 

**ix.**

At the wedding there is drinking and feasting and white banners in the streets. The whole Corridor (and friends from all around the city) attend. They witness as the two join hands in the gazebo Magnus crafted carefully with his own and they promise their own forever.

For a moment, he feels invincible. Nothing will ever take her from him.

 

**x.**

“I love you, Jules.” It’s the first time they’re apart in years.

 

**xi.**

He returns to the crumbled buildings of the Craftsmen's Corridor and he can’t stop himself from falling to his knees. The tears don’t come. He sees the remains of the Hammer and Tongs. The tears don’t come.

He finds her bandana in a puddle between the cobblestones.

 

**xii.**

“Your husband asked me to tell you he loves you.” The reaper, Kravitz, tells her, on a visit out of the blue. “He’s… quite something, isn’t he.” For the first time in a long time, she smiles.

 

**xiii.**

She gazes at him through the window of the Bond Engine, hoping that he’ll think to summon her when the time came. It was selfish of her, but she’d missed him so wholly, so fiercely. He looked so different now. It stirs a certain sadness within her to observe all the changes she’d missed. He looks broader now. Stronger. He’s standing with his back to her, then he turns, and there he was: her husband. Her heart swells with pure light, enough that she feels she could even burst through the window without a summoner. There’s a wicked glint in his eye, the same one that she’d seen many times during the revolution, and there, on his hand, his wedding ring. He can’t hear her, but she cheers as he fights on.

 

**xiv.**

He lives so much longer than she ever thought he would. She feels so relieved that he’s found something beautiful in the world. She dreams about the Story and Song and waits, for decades, for him to tell it to her himself.

  
**xv.**

He gazes at her from a distance as she sets the ladder down against the cottage. A red bandana keeps her hair out of her face as a perfect breeze floats around her. The tears flood his eyes before she even turns; there she was, standing, framed in the purplish light of dusk, _Julia._ And his heart leaps in his chest, stretching its legs after an impossibly long life without her.

Their eyes meet, at long last. She laughs. He does too, through his tears.

The wind ripples through the grass and the wildflowers. Above them, a million twinkling stars dot the permanent twilight sky. Below, a million swirling souls beneath the placid water. And between them, their home, as it was meant to be so long ago.

They run to each other and, for the first time in decades, he’s holding her. He weeps into her hair. Lavender and iron. _I’m sorry I made you wait._

And, crying, _I tried to make you proud._

And then, _I love you. I love you. I love you._


End file.
